More like this

IBM gives Cluster 1350 an Opteron nudge

3.0GHz hot box

IBM has regussied the System Cluster 1350 with some new servers just ahead of the International Supercomputer conference in Dresden.

The ins and outs of the hardware upgrade follow along familiar lines. IBM has made its latest and greatest x86-based machines available for the pre-packaged 1350.

For example, customers will find the 1U x3455 available with 95W dual-core Opterons running at 1.8GHz, 2.6Ghz and 3.0GHz. That's because IBM has picked up the fresh Opterons AMD released in April that kicked the dual-core part to 3.0GHz for the first time. So, a similar situations holds true for the 4U Opteron-based x3755 system.

Complementing the Opteron systems, IBM ships the Cluster 1350 unit with Xeon-, Power- and Cell-based servers too. You can find the full list of hardware here. IBM won't update the Opteron-based server specifications until later this week when it announces the new systems at the supercomputing show, but we got the early jump on the news.

IBM has added a boatload of networking options to the 1350 as well, with most of the gear coming from good friend Cisco. The cluster now supports Cisco's 48-port Catalyst 4948, 24-port 2960G and the SFS 7000 Series Infiniband server switches, which some of you will remember as Topspin's kit. IBM has made room for Voltaire's 24-port 9024S Infiniband switch bundle too.

The Cluster 1350 has stood as one of IBM's answers for the HPC (high performance crowd) for quite awhile now. IBM does most of the assembly grunt work for you and then ships off a ready-to-burn cluster running SLES 9 or 10 or RHEL 4.0. ®